Nothing says rejection like a letter that starts off with 'Dear Contributor'. I mean, sometimes you have to read half-way through the letter before you discover if you got into the college you wanted, or if you got the job. But 'Dear Conributor', well, you don't need to read past the first line, do you? Smooth.

The editor of this anthology seemed to make a concerted effort to not commit to any sort of value statement. While he says there were lots of excellent pieces he couldn't use, he doesn't state that mine was one of those. Really, he could be saying: Hey, we got so many submissions that we even had to reject some good stuff. They weren't all easy rejections, like yours.

My Rebuttal: Ah, obviously, if they rejected a piece like the Chocolate Milk Challenge, they don't know the first thing about wit anyway. In fact, anybody who uses the term wit obviously has no decent sense of humour. It's such a dry term. Their anthology of Canadian 'Wit', after all, wasn't called Crazy Hilarious shit that will make you shoot milk out of your nose even if you're not drinking milk, eh? or Stories to pee your pants by while living in a Crazy Canadian Igloo and Drinking Milk Straight from the Beaver. No. Instead, they made a really obvious and dry pun using the word wit. Furthermore, the anthology, published in Ontario, isn't even close to 'West', north or otherwise. They couldn't even accept me, a Western writer, to bolster their title. Well, like I said. I'm sure they have no wit anyway. Perhaps their market for this book is guys who sit in dining halls and read through lorgnettes. It's too bad, really...because these fine gentlemen will now never know the righteous, raucous comedy (or stupidity) that is the Chocolate Milk Challenge.